Tag Archives: hate speech

From New York City Patch: Two Brooklyn politicians want cops to examine New Yorkers’ online activity to prevent more hate-fueled tragedies like the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre. State Sen. Kevin Parker and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams proposed legislation Friday that would incorporate social media accounts into background checks for gun buyers.

They argue doing so would help law enforcement authorities spot dangerous people like Robert Bowers, who reportedly declared his hatred for Jewish people online before allegedly killing 11 people last Saturday.

“You would have thought this person was a model citizen until you examined his social media profile,” said Adams, a Democrat. “And you would have noticed he was not a model citizen, he was a broken citizen that was a time bomb that was waiting to explode.”

The pair of bills would empower the New York State Police and local departments like the NYPD to checkthree years of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat activity for anyone applying for a gun license in New York, Parker said.

Authorities would flag anything that is an “immediate threat to public safety,” he said. Gun buyers would also have to let police comb through a year’s worth of their search engine histories under the legislation.

The state’s SAFE Act — known as one of the nation’s toughest gun laws — requires instant federal background checks for all gun sales except those between immediate family members. But lawmakers have to do more in the wake of recent hate crimes such as the Pittsburgh shooting, Parker said.

“We certainly want to make sure that we’re adding to the protections that we need to make sure that people that we’re putting handguns and rifles and shotguns in the possession, that they in fact are the people that are using them in the right way,” Parker said.

The syngagogue massacre, in which 11 people died, came just a day after federal authorities arrested Cesar Sayoc, the Florida man accused of mailing bombs to high-profile Democratic figures. Sayoc had searched for his targets’ addresses online, federal prosecutors allege.

Lawmakers are still working out exactly how law-enforcement officials would go about accessing social media profiles that are not publicly viewable, Parker said, though he noted the legislation would require gun buyers to make their profiles available.

“We’re going look at what’s in the universe already and use that as one of the tools to determine the profile of a person who’s attempting to purchase a handgun,” Adams said.

The Queen has spoken.
From Hollywood Reporter: Elton John has no tolerance for homophobia, and now the legend has blamed social media for allowing hate speech to slide on their platforms. In an interview with BBC News on Friday (June 8), John said that major social media companies “haven’t done anything to try to stem the flow of hate on the internet,” and proposed that a boycott could make them take action.“I don’t know why they allow it. It’s supposed to be free speech, but the things that are on social media are so disgusting that there has to be action taken by the people who own these companies. ... People say, ‘Well, what about my freedom of speech?’ Well, sod your freedom of speech,” he said.
John explained that a boycott would make social media giants “sit up” and take a stance against homophobic hate speech on their platforms.
The interview followed shortly after John gave the Diana, Princess of Wales lecture on HIV, where he also demanded social media companies take more aggressive action.
“Companies like Facebook and Instagram cannot pretend they are purely private enterprises. I believe they have a public role and responsibility,” he said. “But if we found ways to automatically respond to hatred with fact, good could be all the way around the world before falsehood even got its boots on.”
DCG

From Fox News: A Swedish prosecutor may have set a dangerous precedent last week in regards to the Islamic State flag.
Prosecutor Gisela Sjovall announced last week that a 23-year-old man wouldn’t be charged after posting the flag to his Facebook page in June, according to The Local. Authorities in Laholm had investigated the man, who came to Sweden from Syria, on suspicion of committing “hate speech.”In comparison to the Nazi symbol which has come to be a symbol for prejudice against Jewish people,the same couldn’t be said for the Islamic State flag, Sjovall added. “Up until now, we haven’t come to that point,” she told the Hallandsposten, a local newspaper. “That could change in ten years.”The Local noted that under Sweden’s hate speech laws, for an image to be considered “hate speech,” it needs to threaten or disparage a group of people in connections to their race, nationality, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.

No disparagement here…

“If there had been anything in the text (posted alongside the flag) with more specific formulations about certain groups, for example homosexuals, the ruling could have been different,” Sjovall said. “For me, there are no doubts about the decision not to prosecute.”
Sjovall said the man told authorities in June that he does not support ISIS. The man’s lawyer said that what he posted wasn’t an ISIS flag, but a symbol of what had been used within Islam for hundreds of years before ISIS misconstrued its meaning.
The flag had already been banned in the Netherlands and Germany. Former British Prime Minister David Cameron had also said that anyone displaying the ISIS flag should be arrested, but there wasn’t a law barring people from displaying it.
DCG

There’s an angry femi-nazi on Twitter and her name is Julie Bindel. From her Twitter bio:“Journalist, author, broadcaster. Feminist activist. Full-on lezzer. Research Fellow, Lincoln University.”
From her Wiki page:“Julie Bindel (born 20 July 1962) is an English writer, feminist, and co-founder of the law-reform group Justice for Women, which opposes violence against women and helps women who have been prosecuted for killing violent male partners. She is the author of Straight Expectations and co-author, with Harriet Wistrich, of The Map of My Life: The Story of Emma Humphreys.Bindel is a visiting researcher at Lincoln University and former assistant director of the Research Centre on Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations at Leeds Metropolitan University. In 2010 she entered The Independent’s “Pink List” as 89th of the top 101 most influential gay and lesbian people in Britain. She writes regularly for The Guardian. While focusing on male violence against women, Bindel also writes about gender inequality in general, as well as stalking, religious fundamentalism, lesbian rights, opposition to the sex industry and human trafficking. She refers to herself as a political lesbian feminist.”
And now, from her Twitter feed:“Dear misogynist trolls I’m going to make things easier for you – save u some time. All men are rapists and should be put in prison then shot”

Julie Bindel: Femi-nazi that practices hate speech

Feel the love! And feel free to give her your own message on Twitter, go here!
h/t Twitchy
DCG

Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former White House Chief of Staff, famously said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Rahm was merely making explicit what the Left had been practicing for decades — the exploitation of some public tragedy by reflexively blaming the Right.
As an example, the Left blamed the “climate of hate” in conservative Dallas and the “paranoid style” of American (conservative) politics for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, despite the convicted killer Lee Harvey Oswald being an avowed Marxist!
It’s the same liberal modus operandus in the recent Tucson, Arizona mass murders. Before anyone even knew who and what the shooter was, the Left and their complicit accomplices in the MSM already began pointing their fingers at “right wing hate rhetoric” as the culprit. Even after the facts began pouring in about Jared Lee Loughner — that he was apolitical, paid scant attention to the news, did not listen to talk radio, but instead is a drug-addled mentally-disturbed loser who worshipped at a skull-bedecked homemade altar — the Left’s scapegoating and demonization of Conservatives persist, undeterred by facts or the truth.

Paul Krugman himself engages in hate speech (A BKeyser design)

True to Rahm’s injunction, the Left did not let the crisis go to waste. In the aftermath of the Tucson tragedy, the father of Christina Green, the 9-year-old girl killed in the massacre, pleaded with the nation that his daughter’s death should not be exploited as a justification to crush constitutional rights. But the Left are doing exactly that.
First, Demonrat California Sen. Barbara Boxer sprang into action to censor the conservative organization Patriot Post. Below is a letter from the Patriot Post explaining what happened:

A staff member from California Demo Sen. Barbara Boxer’s office discovered a small image of an old sticker from the humor section of PatriotShop.US, targeting liberals for defeat prior to 2013. This image clearly was intended as humor but is no longer on our site. Only a small number of people had ever actually seen it.
Boxer believed that this three-inch image was too dangerous to be seen in public, lest it incite murderous violence. Ostensibly, to make her point, she enlarged the image dramatically, distributed copies of it at a televised news conference, and displayed it for the entire nation to see. (One may presume that her audience included more than a few psychopaths who otherwise would never have seen this image … good thinking Babs!)
We now find ourselves in the good company of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and many other conservatives who stand accused by the Left of provoking murderous attacks through words and imagery. However, Boxer’s public accusations pose a serious problem for us. While we have a large following, we remain a grassroots organization, not a well-funded political or media conglomerate.By midweek, Boxer and her entourage of histrionic sycophants were actively endeavoring to have the entire PatriotShop.US site censored — and shut down. (And we thought Democrats wanted to create jobs.)
To date, our team has done an outstanding job of repelling Boxers efforts to silence us, and we will do everything in our power to continue to defend our First (and Second) Amendment rights. We write simply to ask for your prayers on behalf of our steadfast defense of Essential Liberty.
— The Patriot Shop Staff

Then, we learn that the FBI is compiling a list of Americans deemed a potential threat because they criticized their representative – and targeting them with home visits. As Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars reports:

An Ozark man who ran a blog last year critical of Republican Congressman Billy Long was shocked to see an FBI agent turn up on his doorstep asking questions. The agent was accompanied by Green County Sheriff Jim Arnott, who had stepped outside of his jurisdiction to become involved in this act of political repression directed against Clay Bowler, a resident of Christian County.
The FBI agent wanted to know if Bowler was a threat to Long because he had used an Internet blog to highlight claims of cronyism and corruption involving the Congressman before the southwest Missouri election in November, in which Long defeated Democrat Scott Eckersley to replace outgoing Rep. Roy Blunt.
The most heated confrontation Bowler had with Long was when he asked him a question about political donations Long had made. The video clip of the incident shows Bowler calmly asking Long a question as the Congressman walks away. He ran a website called “Long is wrong” in an attempt to prevent Long from being elected last year. The website has since been discontinued and Bowler hasn’t had any contact with Long since September.
Even the FBI agent who visited Bowler had to agree that his actions represented no kind of threat whatsoever. “I’m not a threat to Billy Long,” Bowler said Thursday. “I find the whole thought very funny, because I’m such an advocate for constitutional rights that I would never do anything that would put in jeopardy those constitutional rights like the Second Amendment”….
“Arnott confirmed to KSPR News that Bowler isn’t the only local person who’s been scrutinized in the wake of last weekend’s shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Gifford (D-AZ) during a meet-and-greet with constituents in Tucson, Ariz,” states the report, affirming that the authorities are compiling new lists of Americans who are now considered to be potentially violent threats for the crime of asking their own public servants uncomfortable questions. Separately it was reported that the FBI was preparing to visit other bloggers in the area.
Targeting anyone who exercises their First Amendment right to redress their grievances against local representatives who are paid to serve them with home visits accompanied by FBI agents only has one outcome – it chills free speech and discourages other Americans from speaking out against the government. These tactics also have the impact of making asking questions of elected officials, the lifeblood of a free society, seem somehow abnormal or suspicious.
Once again, vultures are still busy circling around last weekend’s tragedy, using it as a vehicle through which to advance their own authoritarian and anti-American agendas of political repression.Dissent is the highest form of patriotism, and any move to imply that asking questions of public officials or engaging in criticism of government is somehow suspicious or indicative of a violent individual is a damning indictment of everything America is supposed to stand for. Circumstances like these should only encourage Americans to become more vocal in their dissent while they still have any semblance of free speech left at all.